廣告

2010年10月27日 星期三

巴菲特先生比亚迪沒穿衣

分析：巴菲特梦破比亚迪？

Buffett’s Chinese car dream sours

From building dreams to breaking them: Warren Buffett’s favourite Chinese car maker BYD, otherwise known as Build Your Dreams, revealed a hope-shattering drop in third quarter earnings of 99 per cent on Tuesday.

It’s not a sign of anything terminal for the Shenzhen-based company in which Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has a 10 per cent stake. But it is a nightmarish sign (at least for investors whose optimism had not already been extinguished) that the golden days are over.

BYD on Tuesday was announcing results for the nine months to September, but a calculation based on its results for the first six months indicated that third quarter net earnings had plunged to just Rmb11.8m ($1.78m) compared with Rmb1.16bn in the same period last year.

为什么会这样？销售趋弱。

Why? Weakening sales.

该公司在香港的股价对此作出了反应，周二下跌逾10%，至一个月新低，也创了近两年内的最大单日跌幅。

In reaction, the company’s shares in Hong Kong fell over 10 per cent on Tuesday to a one month low, their biggest one-day drop in nearly two years.

从生产电池起步的比亚迪虽然在8月份已发出预警，将今年汽车销售目标削减25%，至60万辆，但其业绩比分析师们原先预计的还要差。

BYD, which started out making batteries, had raised a warning flag in August by cutting its car sales target for the year by 25 per cent to 600,000 vehicles, but its results were worse than analysts had expected.

BYD has become a high-profile example of a Chinese company that has grown spectacularly for a while but then struggled to reinvent itself fast enough to maintain the momentum. This time last year its F3 car was one of the most popular in China, but now it has lost favour and vanished from the top ten sellers.

Investors were disappointed by its sharp drop in earnings when other automakers were posting strong results … It suggested that the products are having problems.

正如英国《金融时报》上周报道的那样，过去18个月里，在包括税收减免在内的政府刺激措施的推动下，中国汽车销售表现一再超越预期。

The company has also delayed its plans to export electric cars to the US, and it has had seven facilities seized by the Chinese authorities this year after it was accused of building them illegally.

随着刺激措施的效果逐渐褪去，8月和9月的同比销售增幅放缓到17-18%——尽管在病怏怏的西方，那仍是令汽车销售员们梦寐以求的数字。

As the FT reported last week, mainland auto sales have consistently outperformed expectations over the past 18 months, spurred in part by government stimulus measures including tax breaks.

与此同时，比亚迪8月份的销售同比下降了19%，9月同比下降25%。

As the effect of stimulus measures fades, the rate of sales expansion in both August and September slowed to 17-18 per cent compared with the previous year - although those are still figures that car salesmen in the sickly west can only dream about.

As BYD lost market share in the past quarter, long-established foreign manufacturers led by General Motors and Volkswagen gained ground in China.

巴菲特上月在首次造访深圳时称，比亚迪是“世界上增长最快的汽车公司”，当时这家公司正售出其第100万辆车，而那距离公司成立只有7年。

In the FT in February, Joe Studwell, founding editor of the China Economic Quarterly, focused on another, smaller part of BYD’s business - battery making - and said:

下个7年将艰难得多。

Fridges, microwave ovens, television sets, steel, motorbikes, cars, and now new energy businesses: all have given rise to Chinese manufacturers with very substantial production volumes that have failed to translate into the kind of earnings that sustain rising share prices in the long run.